Various types of surgical drapes have been used to keep a surgical site on a patient sterile during a surgical procedure. Traditionally, surgical drapes were linen or woven cloth, and were sterilized after each use for reuse. More recently, disposable drapes have been introduced, in which a nonwoven paper or fabric forms a substantial part of the drape. A reinforcement area is often placed around a fenestration or an edge of disposable surgical drapes to provide structural strength and to absorb bodily fluids from a surgical site. Many disposable drapes also include a number of layers of different materials for the drape area and reinforcement area, with each layer providing a different property to the drape. For example, spunbond fabrics, meltblown fabrics, and polymer films have been used as layers in disposable drapes.
Many different shapes of surgical drapes have been proposed, often depending upon the specific surgical procedure to be performed. For example, the shape of the drape is often specifically designed to fit around a specific surgical site on the body. In some cases, a fenestration, as mentioned above, is provided through a drape to allow medical personnel access to the surgical site, whereas the remaining sheet portion of the drape covers the rest of the body and table. Moreover, several drapes are often used in combination to cover a patient. In some cases, several rectangular drapes, often called universal drapes, are laid over the patient in a pattern providing an opening through which the medical personnel can access the surgical site while also covering the remainder of the patient's body and the table.
Certain surgical procedures involve large amounts of fluid, for example blood or saline irrigation fluid, at the point of surgery. Certain procedures also require the fluid to be removed from the point of surgery and safely contained within a container or absorbent material. For instance, towels or other absorbent material that is placed on the top surface of a surgical drape may be used to absorb this fluid. It is also the case that suctioning devices and surgical sponges are used to remove fluid that is within the patient during the surgical procedure.
Problems with the towels and other absorbent material placed around the point of surgery exist where the towel or absorbent material becomes so saturated with fluid that the fluid begins to wet the patient, clinician, and/or surgical table. As such, drapes have been provided with features that are designed to transport fluid away from the point of surgery to another point on the surgical drape where the fluid can be absorbed or removed. This is done in order to move the fluid from a zone proximate to the point of surgery to another location on the surgical drape that will reduce the likelihood of contamination to and from the patient and clinician. Drapes with a plastic trough attached to the surgical drape and positioned so as to transport fluid from the point of surgery to a more remote area of the surgical drape are examples of one way that such features are provided.
Also, these types of draining features have been made of the same absorbent material used in a surgical drape, but treated so as to be of lesser absorbency than the absorbent material into which the trough drains. In this instance, the trough is made by heat treating a particular absorbent material so that the portion of the absorbent material formed into the trough is of a lesser absorbency than the absorbent material into which the trough drains. However, these types of drainage features on surgical drapes are limited in that they are only capable of transferring fluid from one location on the drape to another location. In essence, the drainage features of present surgical drapes do not provide for a way of spreading the fluid out over a larger portion of the absorbent material so that the fluid is more readily and safely absorbed. Current drainage features on surgical drapes are only capable of transporting fluid from one location to another, and as such still allow a particular portion of the surgical drape to become saturated with fluid and hence increase the probability of the fluid leaking from the surgical drape and not being properly absorbed.
As such, a need currently exists for a surgical drape that has a diverting feature for fluid that both diverts the flow of fluid on the surgical drape and provides for a better absorption scheme on the surgical drape.